How to Remove Location and EXIF Data From Your Photos

October 4, 2026

The hidden information inside a photo

When you take a picture with a phone or a camera, the image file gets more than pixels. It also gets a block of hidden data called EXIF metadata. Typically that includes the make and model of the device, the exact date and time, camera settings such as exposure and focal length, and, if location services were on, the GPS coordinates of where you were standing, sometimes accurate to a few metres.

Most of the time this is harmless and even useful: photo libraries use it to sort pictures by date and place. The problem starts when you share the original file with people or places you did not intend to tell everything.

When it matters

Selling things online. A photo of an item taken at home can reveal your address to anyone who knows where to look.
Posting from home or work. Pictures of your children, pets or garden might point to where you live.
Sharing with strangers. Forums, support tickets, classified ads and file links can all expose the original file.
Professional privacy. Journalists, researchers and anyone with a reason to keep a location private have long been told to strip metadata.

Many large social networks remove most metadata from the public copy of your picture, but you cannot rely on that everywhere. Email attachments, messaging apps that send the original file, cloud storage links, forums and websites you upload to may keep it intact. The safest habit is to clean the photo yourself before it leaves your device.

How to see what a photo reveals

You can look at the metadata on your own device before deciding what to do.

Windows: right-click the file, choose Properties, then the Details tab. Look for GPS coordinates under the location section.
Mac: open the picture in Preview and choose Show Inspector from the Tools menu, then check the EXIF and GPS tabs.
iPhone: open the photo, swipe up and you will see a small map if a location is saved. When you share, you can tap Options and turn Location off for that share.
Android: open the photo in your gallery and choose Details or the information icon.

You can also stop the problem at the source by turning off location tagging in your camera app settings, though that will not clean pictures you have already taken.

How to remove the metadata in seconds

Open the image metadata remover.
Drop in one or many photos. JPG, PNG and WebP are accepted, up to 20 files at once.
Click the remove metadata button. There are no settings to configure.
Download your cleaned photos, which arrive as a zip if you added several.

The tool re-encodes every image from scratch in your browser, which means the hidden data is simply not carried over, while the visible picture stays unchanged. Your photos are never uploaded to a server, which is an important point for a privacy tool.

Check that it worked

After cleaning, open the new file's properties the same way you did before. The camera model, date and GPS entries should be gone. It is a good habit to test once with a picture that definitely had a location, so you can trust the result.

What metadata removal does not cover

Cleaning EXIF is one layer of privacy, not all of it. Keep these in mind:

What the picture shows. A street sign, house number, a view from your window or a school uniform can reveal as much as GPS.
The file name. Some cameras and apps put dates or place names in the name of the file.
Videos. Videos carry their own metadata, and this tool works with images only.
Small, deliberate edits. If you need to hide a face or a number plate, the image has to be edited, which metadata removal does not do.

Combine it with other prep steps

If you are getting photos ready to post or send, you can do everything in one sitting. Clean the metadata, then shrink the file with the image compressor so it loads fast, and crop to the right framing with the image cropper. For help with the exact dimensions each platform expects, see our guide to social media image sizes in 2026.

The short version

Photos can quietly carry your location and device details. Check what yours reveal, strip the metadata before you share the original file, verify the result once, and remember that what is visible in the picture matters as much as what is hidden inside it.